Deeper than your average comic

April 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

I really enjoyed the flash driven “Brainstrips” by Alan Bigelow because of it’s simplicity and the satirical humor it presents in a comic book format. I have never been a huge fan of comics but I think Bigelow does a great job using the familiar panel interface to answer some of life’s greatest questions.  The answers to the questions of course are not straightforward and are presented in a medium where “logic and pedantry have no play”. The playability came very naturally to this game, was just like flipping through a ’50s comic book except for the reoccurring use of sound which I thought was very effective in putting the user in the scene of the action and at other times was just amusing.

The Science for Idiots section was particularly entertaining for me. Anybody who is flat out ignorant to the world of science should click through this game and learn some facts that will get you some attention at a bar. Have you ever wondered about the logistics of actually digging a hole all the way to China? Then you should definitely check it out.

Science for Idiots delved into some of the politics of scientific advancements. It turns out that keeping chimpanzees in cages the same size of cubicles results in some very familiar side effects. Making a very unusual case for the evolution theory…the attention span difference in young chimps and kids isn’t that far off either.

I think comic book style was an interesting choice to present the serious subjects because it would often make the content seem either very serious or very trivial. The answer is either profound or it is joke. I thought that the particular science factoid about nuclear bombs amusing because of the graphics….and then very intense.  Right off the bat I thought this seemed pretty neat…

 

Question: Would I survive a nuclear bomb in a big city?

 

….and then extremely terrifying..

 

 

 

 

 

 

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LostPig and Grunk

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I became interested in the interactive fictions we had been playing (such as Shade) and wanted to research more possibly games to play. Specifically I wanted to blog about one, rather than a digital poem or electronic literature story, which I have mainly done in the past.

I came across LostPig after searching for interactive fiction games in Google. My introduction was this:

“Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.”

Not only did I laugh at the name “Grunk” I felt funny reading these short, choppy sentences. I felt in character and that I became Grunk, the man looking for the pig. His speech reads like he is a caveman. I imagined him with a big stick in hand and wearing a loincloth.

I tried going north, south, east and west and couldn’t make a move anywhere. I typed help in search for help. I was led to hints.

After making way through a part of the forest and bushes, Grunk fell down a hole where the pig in fact was. I appreciated that “sub notes” provided in brackets that offered me advice on what to do next. For example, after the pig had Grunk running in circles after him, I typed:

 “yell”

(response) Grunk can try TELL PIG ABOUT ENTERANCE or ASK PIG ABOUT GROUND or OINK AT PIG.

After trying to communicate with the pig, I realized that the more I paid less attention to it and searched other things, the more the pig interacted with me or the story. This game made me laugh and was on the less serious side like we’ve been playing. You can’t die in this game and its comical and light.

The author of LostPig, “Admiral Jota” was the winner of the “IF Comp.” It has been rated and reviewed by many computer world “celebs” such as, Emily Short, Jay is Games and The Onion. Admiral Jota is a software developer who seems to like to use his/her pseudonym name over their real name. I searched for Admiral Jotas bio page and found myself laughing yet again, just like I did at LostPig. Admiral Jota claims that they are a dieter- so they wrote recipes for custard and muffins with lower fat count. I’ll definitely have to try them out!

If I were to change anything about LostPig I think that it’d be cool if pictures were able to insert themselves in some way or that a map could show up on the lower right or left hand corners. Also, music would be fun to insert although I don’t know if that is possible for IF games. I enjoyed this game, and although I’m not an expert at solving and playing them this one seemed to provide the most entertainment to me.

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The Secret Agent You Havent Heard Of

March 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Body of Work

February 23, 2012 By 1 Comment

Author Shelly Jackson tells her personal stories through a hyper text format, but uses something much more primitive to to reveal her stories, her body.  The HTML hypertext format gives a fresh look on the memoir genre and is a very effective medium for her anecdotes by allowing the user to view the picture as a whole as well as select on body parts to examine. It is a very thorough anatomy of her body as well as her life, she tells some of her most pivotal childhood moments and the pictures leave nothing to the imagination as well.

I thought that this was very strange but interesting piece of work. Her tone through out her reflections comes across as very sincere and even talks about her imperfections with out a hint of shame which I thought was very cool.

“My stomach is white and completely flat, and consequently unfit for bellydancing, which nonetheless I work at, off and on. Bellydancing has taught me to roll and flutter it, though awkwardly and unreliably. When I was little, I could suck my stomach in and make a cave or stick it out in a resilient dome that sounded like a drum when I tapped it.”

You really get a sense of somebody is by their body. Where they have been, what they have been up to, even maybe what they’ve been eating. All of her scars, tattoos, and imperfections prompt the her to delve deep in her child hood and pull out memories both big and small that really give you a sense of what her life was like and put you in her shoes.

I’m glad I chose this selection for my writing assignment because I was thinking about also doing a hyper text story. Mine will definitely be not as revealing as this one, but I’m glad I got to see you some different formats and styling I could use. I am think about using HTML5 so I will have to play around with all the different options because I am only familiar with html.

 

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